Progresa/Oportunidades (Mexico)

Country

Mexico

Period

1997–2019

Level of evidence

High

Summary

Mexican conditional cash transfer program created in 1997 (later called Oportunidades and Prospera). It paid poor families, mostly mothers, on the condition that children attend school and the family attend health checkups. Its initial evaluation with an experimental design made it a model for the over sixty countries that now have conditional cash transfers.

Mechanism

Cash relieves immediate poverty; conditions encourage investment in children's education and health, with the aim of reducing poverty in the next generation.

Evaluation findings

• School enrollment and attendance · ▲ Positive effect · Systematic review

  In a systematic review of cash transfer programs, both conditional and unconditional transfers raise enrollment and attendance; programs with explicit, monitored and enforced conditions have substantively larger effects (60% improvement in the odds of enrollment). [doi:10.1080/19439342.2014.890362]

• Learning (test scores) · ● No clear effect · Systematic review

  In the same review, the effect of cash transfers on test scores is small at best. [doi:10.1080/19439342.2014.890362]

• Income inequality · ▲ Positive effect · Decomposition

  In a Gini decomposition, conditional transfers accounted for about 21% of the fall in inequality in Mexico between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, despite being less than 1% of total income. [doi:10.24201/ee.v0i0.387]

Does it apply to Brazil?

Progresa started in poor rural communities and was evaluated there. Bolsa Família is national and has design and implementation features that set it apart from a conditional cash transfer strictly focused on human capital (Soares, Ribas and Osório, 2010). Since the systematic review finds larger effects when conditions are explicit, monitored and enforced, Progresa's results do not transfer automatically to Brazil.

Limitations

• The systematic review pools studies of several programs and countries; the enrollment effect is not an estimate for Progresa alone.
• The share of the fall in inequality attributed to transfers comes from an accounting decomposition, not a causal estimate.
• Many program outcomes were tested at once. The review by Parker and Todd (2017) re-examines effects correcting for multiple hypothesis testing; check it before citing a single effect.
• This brief does not yet summarize the original Progresa experiment's education and health results; that requires reading the full papers and comes in a future revision.

Related analyses

• Income inequality in Brazil since 1980

Where each number comes from

References

1. Baird, S., Ferreira, F. H. G., Özler, B., & Woolcock, M. (2014). Conditional, unconditional and everything in between: a systematic review of the effects of cash transfer programmes on schooling outcomes. Journal of Development Effectiveness, 6(1), 1–43. doi:10.1080/19439342.2014.890362
2. Soares, S., Osório, R. G., Soares, F. V., Medeiros, M., & Zepeda, E. (2009). Conditional cash transfers in Brazil, Chile and Mexico: impacts upon inequality. Estudios Económicos, 207–224. doi:10.24201/ee.v0i0.387
3. Parker, S. W., & Todd, P. E. (2017). Conditional cash transfers: the case of Progresa/Oportunidades. Journal of Economic Literature, 55(3), 866–915. doi:10.1257/jel.20151233
4. Schultz, T. P. (2004). School subsidies for the poor: evaluating the Mexican Progresa poverty program. Journal of Development Economics, 74(1), 199–250. doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2003.12.009
5. Soares, F. V., Ribas, R. P., & Osório, R. G. (2010). Evaluating the impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família: cash transfer programs in comparative perspective. Latin American Research Review, 45(2), 173–190. doi:10.1017/S0023879100009390